Rushmore was a turning point for me. That and The Big Lebowski. And maybe Clerks.
There's a bunch of movies that probably changed the way I look at things, that broadened my horizons, but Rushmore is more certainly on the upper crust of that list. My life, as it stands, would not, could not, be the same without the movie Rushmore. It's just impossible.
I remember when I first heard about Rushmore. It came out the same month that the Laemelle 7 opened up down the street. At first I had no idea what that theater was about. They didn't show any movies I had ever heard about and their lobby was decorated with even more movies I had never heard about, but they were in French, Italian, and German. What kind of movie theater was that? Movies were something I understood as what I would later call mass media. They weren't these obscure pieces of art that the Laemelle was showing.
But, then I started seeing ads on TV for this movie Rushmore. It stared Peter Venkmen and it seemed strange enough, yet funny enough, to meet my need as a movie. It was a turning point for me, I guess. Not that Rushmore met that need, but it hit me at a certain time and at a certain angle that it scored a hit. It stuck. Man on the Moon was another one of those movies that hit the younger me. That movie didn't stick with me like Rushmore did, but they were both a part of this emotional wave I had where I wanted to see movies that weren't about aliens wrecking shit or Bruce Willis blowing something up.
Rushmore, when it came out, was an incredibly attractive film. I said as much to my dad and he agreed. We never saw it in the theaters. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I saw the movie with my sister Amy (who also showed me my first Coen brothers movies and Casino and Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and a whole other crop of movies which escape me right now). From the moment I finished that movie, my life was better. It was funny and sad and clever in a way I had always felt was possible, but had never seen and had never put words to.
Rushmore, when I finished watching it on VHS tape on Glenarm, I was in love.
And that's all there is to say about that without sounding like a romantic jackass. The past, I've always felt, is for jackasses.
